Hitomi Kanehara – Snakes and Earrings Quotes

Search Amazon.com for Hitomi Kanehara “Think about it. God has to be a sadist to give people life.”
“So I guess you’re saying Mary was a masochist?”
“Yeah. Guess so.”

I wanted to live recklessly and leave nothing behind but ashes in this dark, dull world.

All I wanted was to be part of an underground world where the sun doesn’t shine, there are no serenades, and the sound of children’s laughter is never, ever heard.

I flipped through brain-dead variety shows and comatose documentaries for a while before turning the TV off.

I often like to think that if sunlight reached into everywhere on the entire planet, I’d find a way to turn myself into a shadow.

With Ama’s words, the atmosphere quickly returned to normal. Well, at least as normal as it could be considering I was sitting between a guy who’d beat someone beyond recognition for me and another who wanted to kill me.

…there’s no point in me waiting for a solution when I don’t even have a problem in the first place. Life just seemed so empty, that’s all.

…whenever a tiny seed of hope took root in me and began to grow, it was always crashed by a heavy downpour of self-loathing.

I wondered which would be better-to work as a prostitute to live, or to die rather than work as one? I’d say the latter answer would be the one chosen by the healthy mind, but then again, there’s not really anything healthy about being dead.

What does go through someone’s mind when they kill someone anyway? Do they think about the future? The people they care about? Their life all the way up to that moment? And how could I even begin to guess? I was a person who could see no future for myself; a person who cared about no one.

All I could do was escape from reality, but every time I tried to escape from the pain, that same pain told me that I had probably been falling in love with him.

Screw you. Go to hell, you fuckers. I wish I had a great vocabulary to fully express the extent of my pain and hatred. But I don’t. I’m just pathetic. That’s all I am.

Buy the book: Snakes and Earrings

James Joyce - The Sisters

THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: "I am not long for this world," and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout he said, as if returning to some former remark of his:"No, I wouldn't say he was exactly... but there was something queer... there was something uncanny about him. I'll tell you my opinion...."He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery."I have my own theory about it," he said. "I think it was one of those ... peculiar cases .... But it's hard to say...."

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Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Minister's Black Veil

THE SEXTON stood in the porch of Milford meetinghouse, pulling busily at the bell rope. The old people of the village came stooping along the street. Children, with bright faces, tripped merrily beside their parents, or mimicked a graver gait, in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on weekdays. When the throng had mostly streamed into the porch, the sexton began to toll the bell, keeping his eye on the Reverend Mr. Hooper's door. The first glimpse of the clergyman's figure was the signal for the bell to cease its summons.

"But what has good Parson Hooper got upon his face?" cried the sexton in astonishment.

All within hearing immediately turned about, and beheld the semblance of Mr. Hooper, pacing slowly his meditative way toward the meetinghouse. With one accord they started, expressing more wonder than if some strange minister were coming to dust the cushions of Mr. Hooper's pulpit.

"Are you sure it is our parson?" inquired Goodman Gray of the sexton.

"Of a certainty it is good Mr. Hooper," replied the sexton. "He was to have exchanged pulpits with Parson Shute, of Westbury; but Parson Shute sent to excuse himself yesterday, being to preach a funeral sermon."

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Book Choice: The Scarlet Letter

Willa Cather - Coming, Aphrodite!

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort.
The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told on his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very exclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl about University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was invariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottled coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler's. Hedger, as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on gloves unless the day was biting cold.
Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the rear apartment--two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west. His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors, which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy of the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She went to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing. Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young people who came to New York to "write" or to "paint"--who proposed to live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired artistic surroundings.

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Maria Alexander - Coming Hone

My mouth is sour with whiskey and the loaded shotgun lays heavily across my lap in my sofa chair. This is my Christmas Eve ritual.
I hate Christmas. The holidays. The time for families to gather to share love and good cheer. Bullshit. I try hard every year to forget there is a Christmas precisely because it reminds me of my family, but this fucking world won't let me. They've romanticized a nightmare.
Now a major industrialist, my father can list many crimes to his name, some commercial, some social. But the greatest are against his family and me, his oldest son. When he first started, he made me and my younger brothers and sisters work in the "family" business on our country estate. Sometimes through the night. Once when I nodded off -- I was probably ten at the time -- I'll never forget how he made me stand outside in the snow. Barefoot. I caught a severe cold and almost suffered frostbite. Only then did my mother intervene. She sternly lectured him that she didn't have time to wipe noses and rub feet. She had charities to run...

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Ivan S. Turgenev - Phantoms

For a long time I could not get to sleep, and kept turning from side to
side. 'Confound this foolishness about table-turning!' I thought. 'It
simply upsets one's nerves.'... Drowsiness began to overtake me at last....
Suddenly it seemed to me as though there were the faint and plaintive sound
of a harp-string in the room.
I raised my head. The moon was low in the sky, and looked me straight in
the face. White as chalk lay its light upon the floor.... The strange sound
was distinctly repeated.
I leaned on my elbow. A faint feeling of awe plucked at my heart. A minute
passed, another.... Somewhere, far away, a cock crowed; another answered
still more remote.
I let my head sink back on the pillow. 'See what one can work oneself up
to,' I thought again,... 'there's a singing in my ears.'
After a little while I fell asleep--or I thought I fell asleep. I had an
extraordinary dream. I fancied I was lying in my room, in my bed--and was
not asleep, could not even close my eyes. And again I heard the sound....
I turned over.... The moonlight on the floor began softly to lift, to rise
up, to round off slightly above.... Before me; impalpable as mist, a white
woman was standing motionless.
'Who are you?' I asked with an effort.
A voice made answer, like the rustle of leaves: 'It is I ... I ... I ... I
have come for you.'
'For me? But who are you?'
'Come by night to the edge of the wood where there stands an old oak-tree.
I will be there.'
I tried to look closely into the face of the mysterious woman--and suddenly
I gave an involuntary shudder: there was a chilly breath upon me. And then
I was not lying down, but sitting up in my bed; and where, as I fancied,
the phantom had stood, the moonlight lay in a long streak of white upon the
floor.


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Book Choice: The Jew and Other Stories (Webster's Spanish Thesaurus Edition)

Banana Yoshimoto – Hardboiled & Hard Luck Quotes

Her life was like a pale shadow of life, given form by innumerable layers of anguish.

People tend to think they break up because they get tired of the person they’ve been with – that it’s someone’s decision, either yours or theirs. But this isn’t really true. Periods in our lives end the way seasons change. That’s all there is to it.

…And when you take a spill, you can always rise up from it with something good in your hand.

I always focus on the present, so why does the passage of time make me so sad?

…None of this mattered for my sister who was dying. This was a sacred time set aside for us survivors to think about issues we didn’t usually consider. To focus on the unbearable only marred what was sacred.

In the world we now lived in, the good times were a hundred times better.

…I lived in a world of overwhelming sensations; it was like I had just fallen out of love.

These songs had seen my sister through the last September of her life. They weren’t selected for that role, it just happened that way.

Buy the book: Hardboiled and Hard Luck

William Makepeace Thackeray - The Notch On The Ax

Every one remembers in the Fourth Book of the immortal poem of your
Blind Bard (to whose sightless orbs no doubt Glorious Shapes were
apparent, and Visions Celestial), how Adam discourses to Eve of the
Bright Visitors who hovered round their Eden--


'Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.'


"'How often,' says Father Adam, 'from the steep of echoing hill or
thicket, have we heard celestial voices to the midnight air, sole,
or responsive to each other's notes, singing!' After the Act of
Disobedience, when the erring pair from Eden took their solitary
way, and went forth to toil and trouble on common earth--though the
Glorious Ones no longer were visible, you cannot say they were
gone. It was not that the Bright Ones were absent, but that the
dim eyes of rebel man no longer could see them. In your chamber
hangs a picture of one whom you never knew, but whom you have long
held in tenderest regard, and who was painted for you by a friend
of mine, the Knight of Plympton. She communes with you. She
smiles on you. When your spirits are low, her bright eyes shine on
you and cheer you. Her innocent sweet smile is a caress to you.
She never fails to soothe you with her speechless prattle. You
love her. She is alive with you. As you extinguish your candle
and turn to sleep, though your eyes see her not, is she not there
still smiling? As you lie in the night awake, and thinking of your
duties, and the morrow's inevitable toil oppressing the busy,
weary, wakeful brain as with a remorse, the crackling fire flashes
up for a moment in the grate, and she is there, your little
Beauteous Maiden, smiling with her sweet eyes! When moon is down,
when fire is out, when curtains are drawn, when lids are closed, is
she not there, the little Beautiful One, though invisible, present
and smiling still? Friend, the Unseen Ones are round about us.
Does it not seem as if the time were drawing near when it shall be
given to men to behold them?"

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Book Choice: The Book of Snobs

Ami Sakurai – Innocent World Quotes

Every so often the world and I drifted far, far apart this way.

According to the world, the sex was terribly abnormal.

I saw having sex with complete strangers as being no different from masturbating. Never in my dreams did I fear it would change me in any way.

If I were labeled “The Erotic Corpse” and left at an art museum, I would have been a major attraction.

My heart was like the after-image of a dream, and even that trace seemed to disappear. It was scary.

Getting into bed with him was harder to picture than having sex with a Minotaur in the labyrinths of hell.

Masaki’s confession ushered in a kind of intimacy that didn’t have anything to do with sex. It was like friendship, just more lonesome and poignant.

Didn’t bringing a new life into the world atone for my being?

The amnesty was cancelled and I was going back to the prison of pointless life.

Why do people try to patch up their own wounds with the ugly decomposed flesh and blood of others? Knowing they’ll crumble and collapse.

Don’t ever rely on parents, relatives, boyfriends, buddies, anyone like that. If you take that advice to heart, you’ll never have to despair whatever happens to you in life.

Buy the book: Innocent World

Banana Yoshimoto – Goodbye Tsugumi Quotes

People here (in Tokyo) are always getting angry about the smallest things-because it’s raining, for instance, or because some class has been cancelled, or because their dog took a leak in the wrong place.

She was malicious, she was rude, she had a foul mouth, she was selfish, she was horribly spoiled, and to top it all off she was brilliantly sneaky.

…she knew a lot. And of course one has to be fairly intelligent to start with, to think up so many different ways of being mean.

…acting as though she were having fun she managed to keep her suffering down to a minimum.

It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent.

He was The Dad Who Came Late.

Life is a performance, I thought. Perhaps the word “illusion” would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me “performance” seemed closer to the truth.

“Maria babe, I can die in the mountains just as well as I can die by the sea.”

“You know, Tsugumi, I get the feeling that you’ve started speaking more like a human being lately,” I said.
“Maybe my time is running out.” Tsugumi laughed.

This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next-and I didn’t want to forget a single one.

The singing of flutes, the waving of the fans, the passing breath of a salty breeze-all this projected itself slowly into the night, flowing on and on like paper lanterns adrift on a river.

…love is a battle, and you can’t ever let your lover see your weaknesses, not even when you arrive at the very end.

Buy the book: Goodbye Tsugumi